Thanksgiving

We already covered what we're thankful for, but here's the actual celebration of it.

Chaplin Thankstravaganza 2010



2 dinners, 2 venues, 4 turkeys, 1 ham, and just over 7 hours of eating. Don't let nobody say the Chaplins don't know how to party. Danny and I are missing from the above photo (taken just prior to the commencement of gluttony) because I was taking it and Danny was still in his sleep cave after the treachery of turkey orders and subsequent being-done-with-turkey-order celebration. He showed up in time for Turkey #2, which was the heritage turkey, which seemed fitting.

After that we had pie. Then we went to my Uncle Paul's for more dinner with yet more people and by now the day was starting to get a little ridiculous. We worked off the first two turkeys with a little olive picking.

The plan was for us to take them home and cure them. I was so excited to try the difference between water curing and brine curing and might have even worked up the nerve to acquire some lye, but I'm sad to report this was not to be. The olives were horribly infested with olive fly, which, I have recently discovered from research related to my new post-doc, is a growing pest problem in California and is expected to become much worse with climate change. The fruit itself looked fine, except for little pinprick holes where the flies laid their eggs. But when you cut the otherwise fine-looking olive open, it's rotten inside. This wouldn't be so bad, since the pinpricks are easily noticeable and you could just throw away the infested fruit. But every single olive had them. For a few days we hemmed and hawed ("what can we do with them? we can't throw them out. all that picking gone to waste! how bad can it really be? would they even taste rotten? is it worth going through the whole curing process to find out?"), and then Danny noticed little tiny flies swarming around our kitchen. And then he noticed tiny maggots covering every surface of counter underneath our kitchen appliances. Out went the olives. Sorry olive pickers! I feel like I've let the family down, but who wants maggoty olives?

And that was Thanksgiving 2010.